Theatre director also had career in medicine and was member of Beyond the Fringe
Sir Jonathan Miller, the writer, theatre and opera director, and member of the Beyond the Fringe comedy team, has died at the age of 85.
In a statement his family said Miller died “peacefully at home following a long battle with Alzheimer’s”.
Continue reading...Her shocking pictures told the truth about mafia murders – and earned her death threats. Ahead of a powerful film about her extraordinary life, we meet the woman who dared to confront killers. Warning: contains graphic imagery
Letizia Battaglia can still remember the first corpse she photographed: a man lying beneath an olive tree in a field in rural Sicily. It remains a viscerally unsettling image, made all the more so by its telling details: the dead man’s shoeless left foot, the resigned gaze of the policeman guarding the body, the olive leaves hanging low over the spreadeagled torso. The fact that he was a mafioso murdered in a local feud is, insists Battaglia, neither here nor there. “Everyone,” she says quietly, “is equal in death.”
What has stayed with her, over 40 years later, is the smell that hung in the summer air that day and was carried on the breeze. “It was very hot and he had been dead for a few days,” she says, drawing deeply on a cigarette. “Now, as soon as you ask about this photograph, it comes back to me. I can almost feel it, this atmosphere of death.”
Continue reading...No reason given for withdrawal from show, called ‘homosexual flotilla’ by pro-Orbán journalist
Hungary will not participate in next year’s Eurovision song contest, amid speculation the decision was taken because the competition is “too gay” for the taste of the country’s far-right government and public media bosses.
While no official reason has been given for the withdrawal, the move comes amid an increase in homophobic rhetoric in Hungary, where the anti-migration prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has launched a “family first” policy aimed at helping traditional families and boosting birth rates.
Continue reading...It’s 20 years since Spice Girl Melanie Chisholm went solo, but, she says, it has taken until 2019 – ironically, the year of the band’s reunion tour – for her to really find herself
It’s often said that meeting a Spice Girl feels a lot like encountering a cartoon character. You can see it with unfiltered Mel B, poised Victoria and Emma, still resolutely family-friendly at 43. Geri’s modern lady-of-the-manor act is the antithesis of her old outrageousness, yet she is still swimming in camp. But with Mel C – or Melanie C as she styles herself these days – that’s not the case.
Even if she was your favourite Spice Girl, and you have never met one before, and she turns up to your interview in a closed Kings Cross bar wearing a hoodie and trackies – just as she would have done when Melanie Chisholm became Sporty Spice 25 years ago – it’s still only the little things that nod to the fact she was in one of the biggest girl groups of all time. She speaks quietly, often in an awed whisper, and is not beholden to the propaganda-like version of the Spice Girls’ story that some of her bandmates uphold.
Continue reading...Shooting poachers, circling polar bears, flailing four-tonne seals, singing rhinos and the world’s worst sea … the team behind Attenborough’s latest extravaganza relive their thrills and spills
Chadden Hunter, producer, North America and South America
Continue reading...Footage shows man using axe to smash display case in Green Vault of Royal Palace
Police in Germany have released dramatic CCTV footage of one of two suspects in the Dresden jewellery heist using an axe to smash a display case in the state museum’s Green Vault.
Two robbers snatched priceless 18th-century jewellery in an astonishing smash-and-grab raid from the Grünes Gewölbe’s jewel room at the Royal Palace in the east German city on Monday morning. Local media have called it the biggest art heist of all time.
Continue reading...Security footage from Monday morning has captured the moment thieves broke into Dresden's Green Vault museum and smashed open a display cabinet before stealing three ensembles of early 18th-century jewellery the museum has described as 'priceless'
Continue reading...A 6.4-magnitude earthquake struck Albania early on Tuesday, killing four people and sparking panic in the capital, Tirana, and other cities. The epicentre of the quake, the strongest in the region in decades, was about 20 miles north-west of Tirana, according to the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre
Continue reading...Rights groups criticise treatment of Gnawi, whose video has been seen 15m times
A Moroccan rapper who recorded a viral track denouncing the state of the country has been sentenced to a year in prison for insulting the police in a case that rights groups have called “an outrageous assault on free speech”.
Mohamed Mounir, who performs under the name Gnawi, was also fined the equivalent of $103 (£79) after confessing to cursing about the police in a video he posted online in late October. He can appeal the sentence.
Continue reading...From its birth in 2010, the app has grown to reach one billion users. These were its winning images
Leonard Cohen’s final songs can now be heard on the album Thanks for the Dance. Here his son Adam talks about their emotionally complex relationship
“There are some songs I’m half way through that are not bad,” Leonard Cohen said in his final interview, published in the New Yorker on 17 October 2016. “I don’t think I’ll be able to finish those songs.” Three weeks later, on 7 November, having released his 14th album, You Want It Darker, Cohen died in his sleep after a fall in his home in Los Angeles. The task of finishing those songs was passed, at Cohen’s request, to his son, Adam. The results can be heard on Thanks for the Dance, released last Friday.
“Essentially, I wanted to take the listener on an unconscious journey through the sonic signatures of my father’s career, without it sounding like a regurgitation,” says Adam Cohen, who, in his soft Canadian cadences and carefully constructed sentences, can sound uncannily like his father. “My dad always rejected invitations from producers like Rick Rubin and Don Was to make a retro record that sounded like his older stuff. He said he didn’t want to do the nostalgia act.”
Continue reading...From Gyneth Paltrow to Trump, today’s stars speak directly to their fans. But are they really controlling their message?
I have a friend, Adam, who is an autograph seller – a niche profession, and one that is getting more niche by the day. When we met for breakfast last month he was looking despondent.
“Everyone takes selfies these days,” he said sadly, picking at his scrambled eggs. “It’s never autographs any more. They just want photos of themselves with celebrities.”
Continue reading...In wide-ranging speech, actor accuses tech giants of running the ‘greatest propaganda machine in history’
Read Sacha Baron Cohen’s scathing attack on Facebook in full
Sacha Baron Cohen has denounced tech giants Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google as “the greatest propaganda machine in history” and culpable for a surge in “murderous attacks on religious and ethnic minorities”.
Baron Cohen was speaking on Thursday at Never Is Now, the Anti-Defamation League’s summit on antisemitism and hate in New York, where he was presented with the organisation’s international leadership award. He said that “hate crimes are surging, as are murderous attacks on religious and ethnic minorities” and that “all this hate and violence is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history”.
Continue reading...Residents of the Cañada Real, Europe’s largest shantytown, are hoping the 16kms festival will challenge the area’s fearsome reputation for drug dealing and poverty
Just 15 minutes from the centre of Madrid lies Europe’s largest shantytown: 16km of thousands of houses, shacks and tents lining the roaring M-50 motorway. The Cañada Real has been the Spanish capital’s forgotten neighbourhood for decades, both thriving and suffering in the city’s blind spot.
This multicultural community is home to about 7,300 people living in six sectors – but it is Sector 6 that has given it its somewhat fearsome reputation. Here, drug addicts shuffle along listlessly as the dealers flag them – and passing journalists – down to offer cannabis, cocaine and heroin.
Continue reading...The illustrated city: As rapid development sweeps through Alexandria, architect Mohamed Gohar is trying to document both the past and the present of this ancient Egyptian port city
For a long time I have been attached to the past – or the past is attached to me. Either way, the past of my city, the ancient Egyptian port city of Alexandria, is something I feel incredibly strongly about.
As an architect, I have been deeply impacted by the rapid loss of buildings along with their architectural and historical values. The constant fear that the essence of the city will disappear and that I will lose all traces of my own past here, as well as the pasts of others who have lived in this city over the centuries gave me the urge to start documenting what is still standing before people or time tear it down.
Continue reading...Company says there were ‘concerns’ surrounding the film, which was scheduled to premiere Thursday
Apple has caused a stir by abruptly canceling the world premiere of its film The Banker at the AFI Festival in Hollywood on Wednesday.
Related: Apple hopes its new streaming service will make a splash
Continue reading...Printed in 1843, the hand-coloured card originally sold for one shilling and shaped the popular tradition
The world’s first printed Christmas card, an artwork created in 1843 that went on to spawn a global industry, has gone on show at the Charles Dickens Museum in London.
Designed by Henry Cole and illustrated by John Callcott Horsley, in the same year that Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was published, the hand-coloured card shows a family gathered around a table enjoying a glass of wine with a message: “A merry Christmas and a happy new year to you.”
Continue reading...The actor who played Queen Daenerys says she’s been pressured to shoot naked since the show, but is ‘a lot more savvy’ now
Emilia Clarke has revealed she felt uncomfortable acting in some of her nude scenes in Game Of Thrones.
The British actress played queen Daenerys Targaryen in HBO’s sprawling epic, which became notorious for its explicit portrayal of sex and violence.
Continue reading...Taylor Swift has been cleared to perform Shake It Off and her older hit songs at Sunday’s American Music Awards (AMAs) after her former record label backed away from an increasingly bitter row with the music star.
Related: Taylor Swift's former label denies blocking her from performing
Continue reading...Riot police have swooped on pro-democracy activists trying to flee a university they had set ablaze in one of the most violent confrontations in nearly six months of unrest. Hundreds of demonstrators clashed with officers who had threatened to use deadly force, as tensions flared elsewhere in the region
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